Poetry

"A generous, heartfelt gift." - Kirkus (STARRED review)

The legendary Academy Award-winning actress reflects on her love affair with poetry and makes us all believers.

We all want inspiration. We want to feel connected to something universal. And we want to be able to share that wonder with friends and loved ones.

In this beautiful volume, Ellen Burstyn celebrates poetic magic and shares her favorite works. Now into her nineties, Ellen reveals she had an evangelical response to learning poetry even as a child and would memorize and recite the works of Edna St Vincent Millay to envelope herself in the poet's deeper emotional landscape.

As Burstyn continued her epic rise through film and theater-eventually winning an Oscar, a Tony, a BAFTA, and an Emmy-poetry gave voice to her experience as no other literary art form could. She never went anywhere without her curated "poetry pack." While waiting on set, in rehearsal, on a train, or just relaxing, she found comfort in verse.

For nearly nine decades, poetry has led Ellen on a life of adventure, from a pilgrimage to Rumi's birthplace to a friendship with Maya Angelou, during which the poet read her work in Ellen's movie trailer, to selecting the poems to join her in love, in motherhood and in grief. Poetry Says It Better takes us on our own adventure, featuring work by:

• W.B. Yeats
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Mary Oliver
• Kaveh Akbar
• William Wordsworth
• Rumi
• Edgar Allen Poe
• And more

Poetry Says It Better is a perfect daily companion for everyone looking to deepen and add meaning to their life experience. Throughout, Burstyn's charming voice and luminous insights help readers meet her in this poetic celebration-soul to soul.

Die längst überfällige Würdigung eines Songwriter-Genies

Die Songtexte von Dan Treacys Band Television Personalities entführen in ein Paralleluniversum, das aus ganz eigenen Mixturen aus euphorischen Sixties-Referenzen und hartem Sozialrealismus besteht: knallbunte, psychedelische Welten, in denen sich Syd Barrett, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol oder der jungen Woody Allen ein Stelldichein geben, oder eine Tristesse aus Ehekrisen, unbezahlten Rechnungen, Einsamkeit und Depression. Zwischentöne: eher selten, und wenn dann so subtil, dass dem geneigten Zuhörer der Atem stockt.

Bewundert von Kurt Cobain und Pavement, gelobt von Alan McGee, gecovert von den Tindersticks und musikalisch verewigt von MGMT (»Song for Dan Treacy«); die Television Personalities sind eine, wenn nicht gar: die Referenzband des Indie-Pop, der - die Welt war nie gerecht - große Charterfolge verwehrt blieben. »If I Could Write Poetry« versammelt nun zum ersten Mal die Texte von 100 der wichtigsten Songs von Dan Treacy. Dieses Buch ist aber weit mehr als eine Textsammlung, es enthält auch sehr persönliche Eindrücke, Anekdoten und Würdigungen von rund 50 Musiker:innen, Freund:innen und Fans. Mit dabei sind aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum u. a. Künstler wie Carsten Friedrich (Superpunk, Die Liga der gewöhnlichen Gentlemen), der Bachmann-Preisträger Tex Rubinowitz, die Musiker Phillip Boa und Klaus Cornfield (Throw that Beat in the Garbagecan).

Herausgegeben und ediert wird das Buch von Gregor Kessler, der betont, dass er gegenüber Dan Treacy nur schwer seine professionelle Neutralität aufrechterhalten konnte, da er seit mittlerweile vier Dekaden ein begeisterter Hörer der Television-Personalities-Platten ist.

Eine englischsprachige Veröffentlichung.

Recent news images of disastrous floods, fires and earthquakes vividly show we live in an unstable world. This book examines that precarity through an analysis of how disaster is expressed through poetry. It situates poetry of disaster as a distinct poetic endeavour and as an emerging field of academic research. Focusing on a selection of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry collections responding to notable disasters, these collections are explored firstly, as literary texts; secondly, as case studies into why and how the authors chose to write about these disasters in the way they did; and thirdly, as access points for wider investigations into disaster and disaster studies in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The texts also inform an exploration into the binary of man-made and natural , a binary that stubbornly persists in contemporary representations of disaster, however problematic that differentiation is in this age of the Anthropocene. 

This collection explores the teaching of poetry at university. Structured around three sub-sections, Poetic Close Reading, Poetic Periodicity and Poetic Toolkits, the contributors draw on a range of critical perspectives to engage with topics such as ecology, queerness, race and digitality, and use their expertise to establish links with sociology, creative writing and other disciplines in the academy. Chapters are aimed at a diverse body of learners, from workshop participants to taught postgraduates, and can serve as useful primers for lectures, modules, and educational training sessions in higher education. Situated at the cutting edge of the field, the book will invigorate pedagogical approaches to poetry and poetics for a new generation of teachers, students, and readers.